Strange site: operator Behaviour

[baberjaved]

Ok the site: operator on google have been working very strangely for me.
I did a site:mysite.com last week and it should be 9000 pages indexed, then for a couple of days it showed me 23,900 Pages and it has been doing this for a long time now switching between thes 2 counts. Whats wrong? Anyone else has experienced this?

[tedster]

Seems like you're getting results from two different data centers at different times.

However, as many threads here show, the site: operator is not really a dependable report in any case. At best it's a kind of "general ballpark" guesstimate, and it's usually low. By that I mean you can see Google sending search traffic to URLs on our server that are not listed in the site: results.